Musician Quotes

I thought that if I owned nothing, had nothing, was nothing, I would have nothing left to lose, and I wouldn't be scared anymore. Because my whole life I’ve been so damn scared. Scared to live because I was scared to die. But at the same I was so scared of living, so I wanted to die. Or maybe so scared of dying that I refused to live. You don't have to be afraid to fall, when you're already on the ground. You don't have to be scared to lose someone, when there's no one around to lose.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

I think there is a song out there to describe just about any situation.

~ Criss Jami

My kids are starting to notice I'm a little different from the other dads. Why don't you have a straight job like everyone else? they asked me the other day. I told them this story: In the forest, there was a crooked tree and a straight tree. Every day, the straight tree would say to the crooked tree, Look at me...I'm tall, and I'm straight, and I'm handsome. Look at you...you're all crooked and bent over. No one wants to look at you. And they grew up in that forest together. And then one day the loggers came, and they saw the crooked tree and the straight tree, and they said, Just cut the straight trees and leave the rest. So the loggers turned all the straight trees into lumber and toothpicks and paper. And the crooked tree is still there, growing stronger and stranger every day.

~ Tom Waits

[novan]: bassists are very good with their fingers[novan]: and some of us sing backup vocals, so that means we're good with our mouths too...(~ IM chat with Novan Chang, 18, bassist)

~ Jess C. Scott

I mean, reality sucks. The world is a cancer, and shits so bad it’s scary. Everything’s filthy. But you know what? One day, it’s not going to be here. So be glad you know what life is. You’re alive. Live.

~ Mitch Lucker

Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens.

~ ~ Jimi Hendrix (1942-1970)

Everyone wanted me to be the bad boy, the label wanted it, the publicists wanted it, but I was just trying to be myself.

~ Cassandra Giovanni

You read and write and sing and experience, thinking that one day these things will build the character you admire to live as. You love and lose and bleed best you can, to the extreme, hoping that one day the world will read you like the poem you want to be.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

If I knew what to doI'd do more than write a song for you

~ Criss Jami

If you're waiting until you feel talented enough to make it, you'll never make it.

~ Criss Jami

They all believed in him because of the authenticity of his musical talent and his faith in it.

~ Amit Kalantri

I was free with every road as my home. No limitations and no commitments. But then summer passed and winter came and I fell short for safety. I fell for its spell, slowly humming me to sleep, because I was tired and small, too weak to take or handle those opinions and views, attacking me from every angle. Against my art, against my self, against my very way of living. I collected my thoughts, my few possessions and built isolated walls around my values and character. I protected my own definition of beauty and success like a treasure at the bottom of the sea, for no one saw what I saw, or felt the same as I did, and so I wanted to keep to myself. You hide to protect yourself.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

Liberace was certainly master and commander of the ivories ~ he is the only pianist I can watch or listen to without suffering a case of 'Stagefright Sympathy Sickness'.

~ E.a. Bucchianeri

When you're surrounded by all these people, it can be lonelier than when you're by yourself. You can be in a huge crowd, but if you don't feel like you can trust anyone or talk to anybody, you feel like you're really alone.

~ Fiona Apple

Marketing is so powerful that it can make even an extremely untalented musician a one-hundred-hits wonder.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Music is what our soul sounds like when it sings.

~ Xila Toro

The truth is, anyone who puts so much of herself and her life into art as you do must naturally fear any failure in that art as a potential threat to your life. And so you protect your art more than you protect your health or the common forms of happiness the rest of us have. And you probably have this in common with every artist you admire.

~ Arthur Phillips

And remember whatever discipline you're in, whether you're a musician or a photographer, fine artist or a cartoonist, writer, a dancer, a singer, a designer... whatever you do, you have a thing that's unique. You have the ability to make art.

~ Neil Gaiman

It is by continuing to put out good work that the artist best shows his gratitude.

~ Criss Jami

We are not just Art for Michelangelo to carve, he can't rewrite the agro of my furied heart- Lady Gaga 10/22/10

~ Lady Gaga

Music is the soundtrack to every good and bad time we will ever have.

~ Alex Gaskarth

My life is music, and in some vague, mysterious and subconscious way, I have always been driven by a taut inner spring which has propelled me to almost compulsively reach for perfection in music, often - in fact, mostly - at the expense of everything else in my life.

~ Stan Getz

I like the smell of my Grandma's soap - I used to sit in the bath and eat it.

~ Carl Barât

I guess in this culture of ever-shortening attention spans, it's good if a song can lift us out of the madness, even if only for a few minutes.

~ Peter Bradley Adams

Brian came in heavy at that moment on his guitar, the rapid, high-pitched squeal ranging back and forth as his fingers flew along the frets. As the intro's tempo grew more rapid, Bekka heard Derek's subtle bass line as it worked its way in. After another few seconds Will came in, slow at first, but racing along to match the others' pace. When their combined efforts seemed unable to get any heavier, David jumped into the mix.As the sound got nice and heavy, Bekka began to rock back-and-forth onstage. In front of her, hundreds of metal-lovers began to jump and gyrate to their music. She matched their movements for a moment, enjoying the connection that was being made, before stepping over to the keyboard that had been set up behind her. Sliding her microphone into an attached cradle, she assumed her position and got ready. Right on cue, all the others stopped playing, throwing the auditorium into an abrupt silence. Before the crowd could react, however, Bekka's fingers began to work the keys, issuing a rhythm that was much softer and slower than what had been built up. The audience's violent thrash-dance calmed at that moment and they began to sway in response.Bekka smiled to herself.This is what she lived for.

~ Nathan Squiers

I've probably been spit on more that any person alive outside of, I would say, a member of the prison system.

~ Iggy Pop

When can you understand that the music you play is very good? It is when people look at you but see no one, no one but the music!

~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

It’s the lifestyle that’s being packaged and sold rather than the actual meaning.

~ Rain Cooper

We love music deeply, but why? Put simply: music makes lives, shapes lives, expresses all shades and stages of life - and even saves lives.

~ Rasheed Ogunlaru

It was a real party of swells.

~ Elvis Costello

I would spend my life on the road logging hundreds of thousands of miles and my story was always the same. . . man comes to town, detonates; man leaves town and drives off into the evening; fade to black. Just the way I like it.

~ Bruce Springsteen

As Branford Marsalis said in a beautiful essay he write upon Clarence's death, C was blessed with 'the power of musical intent.

~ Bruce Springsteen

I don't think I knew what depression was. I knew I felt funny sometimes and I was different. I think it's a musician thing. That's why I write music. You know, I'm not like some messed up person. There is a lot of people that suffer depression that don't have an outlet, you know what I mean? That can't pick up a guitar for an hour and feel better.

~ Amy Winehouse

When all else fails, there is music. When that fails you, there is beer.

~ James Hauenstein

I skipped between the dancers, twirling my skirts. The seated, masked musicians didn’t look up at me as I leaped before them, dancing in place. No chains, no boundaries—just me and the music, dancing and dancing. I wasn’t faerie, but I was a part of this earth, and the earth was a part of me, and I would be content to dance upon it for the rest of my life.One of the musicians looked up from his fiddling, and I halted.Sweat gleamed on the strong column of his neck as he rested his chin upon the dark wood of the fiddle. He’d rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, revealing the cords of muscle along his forearms. He had once mentioned that he would have liked to be a traveling minstrel if not a warrior or a High Lord—now, hearing him play, I knew he could have made a fortune from it.“I’m sorry, Tam,” Lucien panted, appearing from nowhere. “I left her alone for a little at one of the food tables, and when I caught up to her, she was drinking the wine, and—”Tamlin didn’t pause in his playing. His golden hair damp with sweat, he looked marvelously handsome—even though I couldn’t see most of his face. He gave me a feral smile as I began to dance in place before him. “I’ll look after her,” Tamlin murmured above the music, and I glowed, my dancing becoming faster. “Go enjoy yourself.” Lucien fled.I shouted over the music, “I don’t need a keeper!” I wanted to spin and spin and spin.“No, you don’t,” Tamlin said, never once stumbling over his playing. How his bow did dance upon the strings, his fingers sturdy and strong, no signs of those claws that I had come to stop fearing … “Dance, Feyre,” he whispered.So I did.I was loosened, a top whirling around and around, and I didn’t know who I danced with or what they looked like, only that I had become the music and the fire and the night, and there was nothing that could slow me down.Through it all, Tamlin and his musicians played such joyous music that I didn’t think the world could contain it all. I sashayed over to him, my faerie lord, my protector and warrior, my friend, and danced before him. He grinned at me, and I didn’t break my dancing as he rose from his seat and knelt before me in the grass, offering up a solo on his fiddle to me.

~ Sarah J. Maas

Music embodies feeling without forcing it to contend and combine with thought, as it is forced in most arts and especially in the art of words.

~ Franz Liszt

An illusionist can make himself disappear; a musician can do the same thing: When he plays a piano, after a while we start seeing only the music, not the man!

~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

When I write I like to give equal justice to lyrics, too. I want the song to have meaning for me so I can make it have meaning for the audience.

~ Oliver

I try to make the music give people a chance to become engrossed with what they hear enough to possibly experience things they've probably experienced on their own but don't normally let themselves go so as to feel them fully.

~ Oliver

Sometimes your music sounds like there’s too much inside you. Maybe even you couldn’t get it all out. Maybe that’s why you died. Like you exploded from the inside.

~ Ava Dellaira